Chapter 79: ~Chapter 26~ Part 2

"Repeat after me!" the princess demanded with a severe look while standing on my front porch, her extended finger pointing at me in a very princess-like pose. "NO," she stressed the word, then her finger moved over to my dear assistant standing right next to me with her arm awkwardly entwined in mine, "LEWDING!"

Both of us gave her a flat look in return, and Judy voiced my thoughts by telling her, "'Lewding' is still not a word."

"I don't care," my girlfriend told my girlfriend with a huff. "I want you to promise me you won't get up to anything while I'm away."

"So it's fine when you are around?" I asked in a very innocent voice that was completely genuine and in no way mischievous.

"Yes! I mean, no! No lewd things are allowed yet!" the flustered girl replied with a pout.

"She said 'yet'," Judy stated at my side with a strange light in her eyes.

It didn't go unnoticed by the princess, as she grabbed hold of my assistant and leaned closer to whisper, "We are going to discuss this later, you hear me? Between the two of us. As girls. Understood?"

I had no idea what she was referring to (maybe some 'girl thing', as Josh would put it), nor did I know if my assistant understood, but after a while she gave the princess a shrug, which she conveniently accepted as a sign of agreement.

"Good." Saying so, she turned to me and poked me in the chest. "As for you, Leo: You are still recuperating, so go and rest. Don't go outside. Don't move too much. Do not do any… activity that requires you to move your body a lot." She paused, then repeated her words with extra emphasis: "Any. such. activity."

I gave my girlfriend a wry look and sighed.

"I got it, we are not going to tear our off clothes and jump into the bed the moment you leave, I promise."

Elly's ears went crimson again, which of course didn't secretly amuse me or give me any kind of satisfaction, but she quickly overcame her embarrassment and mumbled something along the lines of, "So long as you understand."

It was around this time that her usual limo rounded the corner, and after some final farewells and a peck on the cheek, my girlfriend left the premises, leaving me alone with my girlfriend.

… Yeah, I know, this is confusing, but this was the bed I made, now I had to lie in it. That aside, Judy and I closed the door behind us and I immediately exhaled a small sigh.

"All right, it's just the two of us now," I said before I glanced down at the girl still holding onto my arm and continued with, "You know what that means, right?"

"We are going to tear off each other's clothes and jump into the bed?"

I gave my dear assistant a flat look and said, "I am going to flick your forehead now."

She only blinked at my statement, so I proceeded to do just as I said, earning me a frown and an unenthusiastic 'ow'.

"Chief, that hurt," she told me while rubbing her forehead, but I scoffed at her protests.

"No it didn't, I barely touched you. Not to mention, even if it did, you would've deserved it. Now stop messing around and please get your notes."

My assistant let go of my arm with what I presumed to be mock reluctance before she clicked her tongue and mumbled, "Spoilsport." Still, in just a few seconds she bounced back and we both took up our customary places in the living room; she sat on the sofa with her phone in hand, while I paced up and down all around the place.

It was at this point when I took a huge breath and tried to clear my head from unimportant thoughts as much as I could. After I felt adequately prepared, I gestured for Judy to pay attention.

"Let's not beat around the bush: the events at the school last Sunday were a disaster, and I believe we are to blame for it." I paused to see if Judy would like to add something, but she was only looking at me expectantly, so I continued, "The writing was on the wall, yet we… No, I ignored it all. One mistake and we could have ended up with one of our friends dying."

"You almost died yourself," Judy told me with a hint of disapproval, and I could only nod.

"Yes, unfortunately. I have nothing to say in my defense. I messed up, and I paid the price," I told her while placing my hand on the still tender scar on my stomach. "In retrospect, there were many opportunities to prevent that night. I should have interrogated Snowy better, or looked into Crowey's movements after I learned that he was out for my blood, but I guess I just didn't take the situation seriously enough." I paused to let my words sink in before I finished with, "That changes now."

The expression on Judy's face somehow felt conflicted, and I had a feeling she wanted to say something, but after waiting for her for a few seconds she just closed her eyes, and when she opened them she was back to normal and simply asked, "How so?"

"First, we have to expand our intelligence network," I answered after just a moment of hesitation. "We've been wasting the potential of the Celestial Hub. We only used it as a source of background information. We need to start using it to monitor the movements of the other factions. We need to know if something is about to happen so we can prepare."

"Sounds reasonable."

"I'm glad you agree. By the way, I want to leave that part to you. I have other plans."

"Such as?"

I paused. In fact, I even stopped pacing up and down for a moment before I told her, "Judy, I'm a mess. I have all kinds of powers, but I have no idea how to use them effectively. Hell, I almost died that night, multiple times, because I kept forgetting about my various abilities at critical moments. I need training. I need to learn how to deal with whatever supernatural nastiness will throw at us next."

"If that happens, do you plan to get involved again?"

"Only if necessary," I answered uncertainly, but then I steeled my voice and added, "No, chances are, I will have to. We have already established that this world is running on the conventions of some kind of 'supernatural-battle-harem-school-life-comedy' genre. I'm afraid what we have seen is just the tip of the iceberg of the 'supernatural battle' part, and I need to be able to hold my own when the next crisis comes knocking around the corner."

Judy pursed her lips almost imperceptibly, but in the end she just wrote a few more notes. I waited for her to finish, then she finally asked, "Which power did you forget about? Your Far Sight?"

"Actually…" I paused again, then I shook my head and began pacing once more. "Actually, open up the file on my powers. I have a lot of new entries."

"Oh?" Judy voiced curiously before she began to furiously poke at her phone for a moment, then she gave me the go-ahead.

"Okay, so my Far Sight is a given, no changes there. I also told you about my ability to see magic. I can apparently also see through magic, such as camouflage, and I can disrupt magic by cutting it with my fingers."

"I got all that," Judy informed me.

"All right. First off, I have precognitive reflexes."

"Didn't we test that already?" she inquired while glancing up at me, and I shook my head.

"There might be some kind of condition to it, such as only reacting to actual danger or intention to harm me. Either way, it was thanks to it that I could survive against Brang and the chimera."

"Who's Brang?"

"The leader of the Faun. The one with the spear."

"You mean the one you growled at?"

That remark made me freeze for a moment before I told her, "Actually, that's another thing. Apparently I can fluently speak Faunish, and started doing it without me realizing it was a different language at first. It might be just that I already knew it from before my amnesia, or it could be another power or ability. Maybe I have one of those convenient magical translation suites common in stories where someone travels to another world."

My assistant gave me a strange look, then she gestured for me to come closer. I did so, and after a few seconds of poking her phone, she showed the screen to me.

"What does this say?" she asked.

I took a close look at the symbols on the screen, but I only shook my head.

"I don't know. What is this?"

"Traditional Chinese," she said as she returned to the phone, and after some more screen-prodding, she turned it my way again. "What about this?"

"'Si vis amari, ama…' Is that Latin?"

"Yes. Do you know what it means?"

"No."

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For some reason, she clicked her tongue as if I spoiled another of her jokes before she returned to her phone, this time for more than a minute, before she showed it to me again. Even at a glance, I recognized the familiar interface of the Celestial Hub, which earned my assistant a curiously raised brow, but she urged me to read on.

"'… Incident at twelve and ten under zone of school Magi…' … No, wait, it's 'inside the territory of the Magi', I think, and…" My voice trailed off as I focused more closely on the screen. "Judy, what language is this?"

"Celestial Script," my assistant answered without missing a beat. "It's a type of magical cipher only Celestials can read. I thought you told MoroseMoose to organize the classified reports because you couldn't read them either."

"Well, I can. Apparently." I squinted at the letters, which were somewhat hazy on a second look, and asked, "What does it look like to you?"

Judy paused for a moment, then she told me, "Like angular hieroglyphs. What do you see?"

"Normal letters," I answered absent-mindedly. "Though if I look at it really hard, I can see the words kinda… shimmer and move around? It's hard to explain."

Both of us fell silent for several seconds.

"So," I asked tentatively, "you said it's like a magical cipher? So does this fall under seeing through magic or understanding languages I have no business understanding?"

"Which is the weirder?"

"The latter," I answered reflexively.

"Then it's that," she told me with a kind of unwarranted sagely wisdom that made me shake my head.

"Doesn't really matter right now, but we are going to test this to hell and back later. For now, let's focus on my other new abilities."

"Roger," Judy answered as she closed the browser and returned to her notes. "So far we have Far Sight, Magic Perception, Anti-Magic Swipes, Spider-sense—"

"Okay, stop! I will talk to you about the other names too, but that last one is just blatant copyright infringement!"

She clicked her tongue again.

"Fine, I will call it 'Chief-sense' then."

"That's… only marginally better."

My complaints fell on deaf ears as she continued, "Then we have 'Maybe Magic Maybe Mundane Multilingualism'. Anything else?"

I took a long, deep breath, and just let it go.

"Yes, I can also teleport now."

My previously pouting assistant's expression took a 180-degree turn in a split second.

"Really?"

Instead of answering right away, I took a deep breath and tried to remember how I did it. I had a feeling the process was incredibly complex, but somehow it also felt really intuitive, like riding a bicycle, and after a moment or two of fiddling in the proverbial saddle, I could feel my surrounding blur for a moment before my vision returned to normalcy and I found myself standing behind the sofa. I let out the aforementioned breath, and then quietly placed my palm on the top of Judy's head.

My dear assistant visibly flinched, then she very slowly looked over her shoulder and told me, "That's new," in a deadpan voice made hilarious by her decidedly not deadpan expression. The whole thing was worth it just for that. I stifled a small chuckle and then walked around the sofa to be face to face with her again.

"Yes, it's new. I just discovered it during my Dominance with Brang."

"Another new term. What's a 'Dominance'?"

"A kind of ritualistic magical duel fought with apparitions. More on that later," I told her before I began pacing again. "So, I obviously haven't done any controlled experiments, but as far as I can tell, I do not have too many limitations on this one. Using it is like my Far Sight; a little disorienting, but not particularly straining at short distances. I do not know how far I can teleport, but based on my experiences during my chase with the chimera, I was moving anywhere between two to five meters without any issues. Anything more than that, and it became much harder and made me lightheaded." I halted for a moment and asked something that bothered me a little, "Hey, Judy? How does this look like from the outside? Did I just disappear? Did it make a noise?"

She was still in something of a daze, but she quickly shook her head and answered, "First you blurred, like you were out of focus, then you were gone. There was no sound accompanying it."

"Is that so? So it's stealthy as well. We are probably going to focus on testing the limits of this ability, because I think this has the most potential utility both in and outside of combat, but before that, there's one more thing." I extended my hand towards her, palm pointing up. "First, do you see this?"

Judy gave me a funny look, but then she squinted at my hand and observed it from multiple angles. At long last, she shook her head and told me, "I don't know. Am I supposed to see something other than your hand?"

"So you can't see it, huh?" I mused as I made my brand new phantom tendril limb thing wriggle a bit. For a second or two I pondered how I could explain it to her, but eventually I decided to be blunt. "You see, after I woke up today, I found myself with a phantom limb of some sort. It feels something like a… tentacle, I guess?"

"Tentacle? Really?" Judy asked with a critical frown.

"Hey, I don't like it either," I protested. "Thing is, I can't seem to do anything with it because it's completely intangible."

"So it's like a real phantom limb," Judy told me expressionlessly, and it was my turn to return her critical look.

"Yes, Judy. It's like that."

"So you can't use it to grab things? Or touch things? Or do tentacle-things with it?"

"No, no, and I don't even know what you mean by the third one," I grumbled as I waved my phantom limb around. "Look, if I try to use it to grab, say, my mug, it just—"

I got this far in my sentence. As I attempted to demonstrate my point and swipe my invisible appendage across my beloved 'I <3 Coffee' mug sitting on the coffee table, my vision suddenly blurred. It was kind of like when I entered Far Sight, except about a thousand times more nauseating. I instinctively staggered back and my knees nearly buckled, but before it would come to that, I was quickly supported by Judy.

"What happened? Are you all right?" She asked in a worried voice which, considering her temperament, could be probably translated to mild panic for anyone else.

"Yes, I just…" I began, but I had no idea how to finish that sentence. What exactly just happened? I shook my head and regained my balance. "Judy, I want to try something. Catch me if I was about to keel over."

"Chief, you can't be serious," my assistant answered with the same worried voice, but then she added, "There is no way I can catch you. You are too big."

"You'll manage," I told her off-handedly as I slowly extended my phantom limb towards the mug. Initially I only touched its surface, but there was no reaction. I tried it a few more times, and then I decided to go, for a lack of better words, deeper. It was like when I extended my consciousness towards a 'dot' during Far Sight. In fact, maybe it was exactly the same? Maybe I was extending this 'phantom limb' all this time? These were questions for later, as at the moment I focused on the mug. As I did so, and my appendage reached deeper, I was once again assaulted by violent nausea. I clenched my teeth and endured. Then, just as tunnel vision was about to set in, something weird happened. … Okay, something even weirder happened.

The mug, for lack of better words, divided, but it didn't. It was the same mug, but when I looked at it, there were countless other beverage containers overlaid on it. Tiny porcelain ones, large metal ones, wide-mouthed ones and cylindrical ones, with or without handles, and all of them had countless color variations. The longer I looked, the worse the nausea became, but I soldiered on, ignoring the voice of the girl in the process of steadily losing her composure at my side.

As I looked even deeper, I realized that the different mugs weren't overlaying each other, but they were… it was hard to explain, but if I were to use an analogy, I'd say they were like leaves on a gigantic tree, except instead of looking at them one by one, I was trying to look at all the leaves on an entire branch at the same time while looking at them individually at the same time. Did that make sense? I wasn't even sure I understood my own analogy, but I had no better words to describe what was going on. Then, as I reached even deeper, the nausea very quickly turned into a terrible, terrible headache. A headache that seemed to permeate my entire being. A very… familiar headache.

I'm going to be honest: I panicked. I could deal with pain, but that headache was something else entirely. I tried to retract my phantom limb, but it felt like… it felt like I stretched it too far? It passed through too many small holes? It got entangled with other branches full of different leaves? It made no logical sense, but something told me that I was in danger, so I pulled with all my might, and after a few 'tugs' my phantom limb finally 'dislodged', for lack of better words. Then, just as abruptly as it came, the headache disappeared along with the tunnel-vision and the overlapping mugs, and I could simultaneously feel my legs wave the white flag as they surrendered to gravity, and I would have probably ended up face-planting on my coffee table if not for Judy's intervention.

When my brain finally started working again, I found myself on my hands and knees, hyperventilating, and my stomach threatening to spread my dinner all over my living room carpet. I quickly got my bodily functions under control, and once my ears stopped ringing and my eyes started focusing, I realized that Judy was holding onto my waist with all her might.

"Dormouse?" I whispered.

"Chief, are you all right?" She asked back while still holding onto me like she was afraid I was going to run away.

"I… I'm fine," I answered through clenched teeth.

"What happened?" my assistant finally let me go and sidled over to the front to look me in the eye. "You said you would try something, then it looked like you had a seizure. Do you have any idea how scared I was?"

"Sorry, sorry," I weakly told her as I sat down onto the floor and took several deep breaths. "I don't think I was supposed to do that. Or rather, I don't think I was supposed to be able to do that…"

"Do what?"

I glanced between her and my beloved mug still sitting on the table without any sign of it being disturbed, let alone being overlapped by every single mug in existence, and at last I weakly muttered, "Something that was against the rules of this world."

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